What the Amish Are Teaching America

From AlterNet:

When the Amish were suddenly pierced by violence, how did they respond?

The evening of the shooting, Amish neighbors from the Nickel Mines community gathered to process their grief with each other and mental health counselors. As of that evening, three little girls were dead. Eight were hospitalized in critical condition. (One more girl has died since.) According to reports by counselors who attended the grief session, the Amish family members grappled with a number of questions: Do we send our kids to school tomorrow? What if they want to sleep in our beds tonight, is that OK? But one question they asked might surprise us outsiders. What, they wondered, can we do to help the family of the shooter? Plans were already underway for a horse-and-buggy caravan to visit Charles Carl Roberts' family with offers of food and condolences. The Amish, it seems, don't automatically translate their grieving into revenge. Rather, they believe in redemption.

Meanwhile, the United States culture from which the Amish are isolated is moving in the other direction -- increasingly exacting revenge for crimes and punishing violence with more violence. In 26 states and at the federal level, there are "three strikes" laws in place. Conviction for three felonies in a row now warrants a life sentence, even for the most minor crimes. For instance, Leandro Andrade is serving a life sentence, his final crime involving the theft of nine children's videos -- including "Cinderella" and "Free Willy" -- from a Kmart. Similarly, in many states and at the federal level, possession of even small amounts of drugs trigger mandatory minimum sentences of extreme duration. In New York, Elaine Bartlett was just released from prison, serving a 20-year sentence for possessing only four ounces of cocaine. This is in addition to the 60 people who were executed in the United States in 2005, among the more than a thousand killed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. And the president of the United States is still actively seeking authority to torture and abuse alleged terrorists, whom he consistently dehumanizes as rats to be "smoked from their holes," even without evidence of their guilt.

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Our supposed Christian nation seems to greatly prefer the wrathful God of the Old Testament to the forgiving and loving God of the New Testament. I remember being taught in Southern Baptist Sunday school many years ago when I was a teenager that Jesus came not only to save our souls, but to free humanity from the strict and harsh laws that had bound his children for centuries before. In other words, Christ's messages of peace and tolerance supercede the violent code that came before him. Of course, I'm certainly no Christian in any religious sense these days, but I do find myself as an adult to be an adherent to much of the philosophy espoused in the Gospels: "love your neighbor as yourself." It's absolutely wonderful to see that the Amish take such words seriously; it is extraordinarily disheartening to know that most American Christians do not.

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